Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set
Page 35
His real name was Michael Southey, and he began his reign of terror in October, 1975, killing some seven people in the Southern California area, with possible links to three murders in Taos, New Mexico. His final victim, Dina Lockhart, died in Cathedral City in November of last year. Although Lockhart was found dead in her winter home, she was the only of his victims to bear teeth marks on her arms and along her neck.
“The Juicer,” in his frenzy, left those indentations as a calling card, which later led to the identification of his body. Southey’s body was found scattered in pieces along the two-mile stretch of highway just south of Palmetto and the Naranja Canyon exit.
An investigator on the case told this reporter that Mr. Southey, a drifter from Santa Fe, New Mexico, had evidently been wandering toward Palmetto, perhaps looking for another murder victim, when some wild animal must have attacked him.
“We were picking up bits of him with shovels and dumping them into wash buckets,” said one member of the Yucca Valley Police Department who preferred not to be identified. “It was a grisly sight. Reminded me of that old Jim Croce song, you know, where he says the guy looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone. That’s what this guy looked like—-a couple of pieces gone, and what was left wasn’t pretty. We were all pretty nauseated—is that the right word? Yeah, very nauseated, but now that I hear it was this Juicer guy I think he got what was coming to him. Makes you think there is a God.”
Wade Franklin of the Animal Control Board confirmed the opinion held by the police, that the animal that attacked and killed Michael Southey was probably a sick wolf that wandered out of the mountains. “It was the fires up in the hills. Drives them down into the canyons,” he said. “But we’re on the lookout now for this animal, which might pose a threat to our communities.”
2
Peter Chandler/Confessions
I saved the article from the local paper about The Juicer getting killed, because I knew that’s how it all started in the past.
Imagine the world that I’m almost two decades away from, and yet a world I am convinced, were I to climb in a machine and go back to that year, that summer, I would not understand the language, I would not be able to breathe the air. And yet, I do go back there, in memory, often, to try and make sense out of what happened to me, to the town of Palmetto, California, to Naranja Canyon, to the Rattlesnake Wash. But most of it seems like static on the radio: I pick up the vaguest idea of that year, the pop songs, the TV shows, world politics. All the things that I’ve used to block Palmetto, to block those signals, especially what happened there with Kevin Sloan and the others, out of my mind, off my wavelength.
And her, the girl of my dreams, the girl of all our dreams.
I was fifteen—a no-good age. I wouldn’t turn sixteen ‘til the Fourth of July, a few weeks away. You couldn’t drink, or smoke, or see R-rated movies; you couldn’t drive by yourself, you couldn’t vote. Except for voting, every fifteen year old in Palmetto, California, had, of course, done all these things: what was stopping us?
But by the end of that summer, I had done much more than I ever thought possible. By the time I turned sixteen, I had committed the most atrocious act imaginable.
Who knows what the human heart is capable of?
You couldn’t live in Palmetto, California for more than twenty minutes without running into one of the Campusky clan. The mailbox in front of the cinderblocked Campusky compound read, “Campus Family,” but they were Campuskys and everyone called them Campusky from little Lollie who was two all the way up to Hank and Greg, the twins, who were almost twenty-three. Twenty-three years Mrs. Campusky had spent bearing little Campuskys like a queen ant living out her years in the linoleum darkness of her kitchen and bedroom, barefoot, pregnant, and, strangely, happy, if you can imagine. At least she was always jolly; but twenty-three years! Pampers, Huggies, Gerber’s Blueberry Buckle! Fights over television shows multiplied by ten! Flu viruses that must’ve seemed eternal! Twenty-three years of refrigerators being ransacked after midnight by those hungry, devouring creatures! Twenty-three years of Snickers, Devil Dogs, Twinkies, Little Debbies, Charm’s Pops, and chicken pot pies! They ate so much food out of the can, the jar, the tinfoil, the box, that the youngest thought her mother’s name was Sara Lee.
And Than was the forgotten Campusky in all that. His mother was always dragging little ones around like burgeoning balls-and-chains at her ankles, and his father was wise enough and cruel enough to be home only long enough for the next conception, then off on the road again with his truck. It was said that Mrs. Campusky’s ovaries were like popcorn poppers and the desert heat kept her puffing up with a never-ending pregnancy. Who could have time for a boy like Than? His brothers and sisters were off in their own worlds of gluttony and sloth and summer reruns. Than was bigger than they were: he out-Campuskyed the Campuskys.
For all that, underneath the fat you could see a nice guy, albeit a perennial reject, struggling like a moth in a cocoon to emerge whole and shining and adult. He had clear blue eyes, high, almost aristocratic cheekbones over which jowls hung like heavy velvet curtains. His jet-black hair shone like dark onyx in the sun and was always greasy and stringy. His shoulders were actually broader than his hips, if that was humanly possible. He had huge hips, which had apparently earned him the nickname “Thunder Thighs.” Even in my own moments of adolescent cruelty, that seemed too cruel. His better physical qualities were hidden for the most part beneath the fat and the twin curses of zits and tits. The pimples were endemic at our age; Than referred to them as “facial hemorrhoids.” His chest, on the other hand, was unique in that it was larger than any girl’s in town.
I had only been in Palmetto two days when this overweight kid introduced himself to me as Than Campusky, the boy with the fartistic temperament. I remember thinking, Oh, sweet Jesus, the rejects are already seeking me out. Than was fat, nearsighted, zit-peppered, and he saved his farts for special occasions.
Still, one summer night, when he persuaded me to meet him at the one form of real entertainment the town offered, he could be a good friend.
In Palmetto, in 1980, what passed for real entertainment turned out to be the pit bull fights.
3
The hot, dry air of the summer night sucked at the back of Peter’s throat as he gasped, cooling down from his run. He had had to sneak out the back window of his house and hightail it. His dad had been drinking so he wouldn’t notice. His little sister, Annie, would squeal on him if she so much as heard a floorboard creak after ten at night. He didn’t like jogging much. He wasn’t all that athletic, and had, in fact, run all the way from home in topsiders. It felt like he had blisters all around his toes.
He searched the shadowy crowd of faces along the edge of the Wash, across men the size of boulders, in red tee shirts, flannels, three-day old beards, red-rimmed eyes, baseball caps, long greasy hair; a few women in the crowd, too, skinny, hungry-looking women with long blonde hair, breasts standing straight up as if aimed skyward, tight jeans and tee shirts, even tighter skin. Headlights from cars and trucks provided the only illumination besides the pinpoint light of stars. Peter heard the sound of a dog growling, and almost jumped as he passed a silver-white pit bull in a chicken wire cage that sat in the back of an open Jeep. The dog began gnashing its teeth and foaming. A few of the men laughed. The air was thick with smoke and a swampy smell of beer—but above all of it was the pungent stink of dog and man mixed like poison.
Than whistled for Peter from one of the cars parked along the gravel road. He was sitting in the back of a flatbed Ford truck, drinking beer and chomping on a burger.
“What took you so long?” Than asked when Peter approached him, out of breath. Than held his hand out for money.
“I only have ten bucks,” Peter said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wad of bills.
“I don’t know, man, you know, it’s supposed to be more.”
“Yeah, well, how much did you pay for the privilege?”
“Campusky, I think the other ten bucks was to buy your way in.”
“No duh, man, no shit, Sherlock, and that calls for more suds,” Than said, tossing his empty bottle back into the truck. It rolled noisily across the metal, hitting something in the back with a soft thud.
“Hey!” A woman’s voice came from beneath a black tarp that was bunched up, and, now that Peter looked at it, was rippling in the back of the truck; it shimmered like water when a fish surfaces.
Than grabbed Peter by the neck and brought him closer so he could whisper, “Someone’s humping someone back there.”
Peter smelled beer breath fizzing against his ear.
Than let go and grabbed another bottle out of the ice-filled trashcan.
“Some sleazy setup,” Peter said. “How many beers you have so far?”
Than shrugged. “Four? Six?”
“What if cops show up?”
Than belched. “They won’t. It’s not like I’m smoking grass.” He made a feeble attempt to twist the cap off the bottle, groaning with the effort. “That’s the Big What-If, isn’t it? Guy, Chandler, that’s one of your least attractive qualities, always worrying about the What-Ifs of the world. What If someone catches us, What If you go blind from it, What If What If What If,” he hiccupped.
Peter reached into the trashcan, grabbing a fistful of ice. He flung most of it to the ground, but sucked on a couple of ice cubes. “What if you’re wrong?”
“Hey, I been wrong before, I’ll be wrong again.”
Peter turned and walked back into the circle of men. Their whispered exclamations sounded like an auction with the volume turned down; every one of them looked like a down-on-his-luck pirate, bandanas or baseball caps on their heads, dark, greasy features shining in headlights, ripped shirts, torn jeans, wild eyes, all of them fanning themselves with paper money, talking about killing: “Rip you to shreds, mofo,” “Gonna take you apart, sucker,” “Gonna bite your head clean off.”
The man in the center – Pepe Alvarado -- was the only silent one.
He just kept taking the cash, folding it neatly as it was passed to him. Some he thrust into his back left pocket, some into his back right, some down into his breast pocket.
Someone in the crowd turned a flashlight on him, and then, just as quickly, the light went dead. The flash blinded Peter for a few seconds, and when he looked back at the man called Pepe, he seemed to be enveloped in a shining aura.
Pepe squinted at him, looking like a wild animal cautiously sizing up its prey within the camouflage of desert brush; he pushed one of the other men aside. His face was sharp and long like a coyote’s, with the same mixture of fear and curiosity and balls in his small dark eyes. Then Pepe’s face transformed: he had, in a split second, sized Peter up, and now he looked at Peter the way a butcher does a skinny animal, to see where the knife would dig in with the least resistance. “You Nathaniel’s amigo?”
Peter nodded.
“Who you on?” Pepe’s voice was low and barely audible. He stood there, his sharp chin thrust out, arms crossed over his chest, like he owned everyone and everything within his sight.
Peter didn’t understand.
“I mean, who you puttin’ money on?” Pepe grew quickly impatient. “Ain’t no slow train here, boy. We got the fight in five, so who you on?”
Peter held up the wad of bills. He stared at it dumbly as if expecting it would speak. His face was turning red.
One of the men in a baseball cap grabbed the money from Peter’s hand. “Silver Molly, put it on Silver Molly!”
Pepe held his hand out and the man passed him the money, He counted it out, one bill at a time. “Ten bucks, boy, not enough to piss on. I told Nathaniel to get in he got to bring in least double this. Ten lousy bucks!” he shouted, and the crowd let out a stream of profanities the way a trait revival congregation might burst forth with amens and hallelujahs!
Pepe tossed the money down on the ground. The other men parted away from it like it was poison. “You and Nathaniel, you want to be big gamblers, you need to take the stakes higher, boy. Bigger risk, better game.”
Peter muttered under his breath; Pepe Alvarado was laughing at him.
Peter went to his knees and began gathering up the bills. A couple of them had fluttered down to the edge of the Wash.
Than waited cautiously by the truck until all the men had moved away from Peter. “I told you twenty.”
“Nice crowd you know, Campusky.”
Than broke out in an ear-to-ear grin. “Yeah, but you’re in now. I’ve seen him toss people out on their asses if they weren’t in. You passed, man. You’re in.”
“I didn’t want to bet on dogs.”
“Don’t attack me. I did this as a favor to you, be grateful.”
“Why are we friends? What do we possibly have in common?”
Than turned pensive for a moment “Nobody else wants to be friends with us?”
Pepe shouted out, “Sloan! Hey! Any you guys see Sloan? Where the fuck is Sloan and that bitch of his? Somebody waitin’ to go get’em? You boys know we don’t get the show on the road ‘less we got his bitch.”
A few of the drunken men volunteered for the mission, and dust rose from their Jeeps and trucks as they swerved out the dirt road to the highway.
“Who’s Sloan?” Peter asked Than.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nitro
1
Nitro slouched beneath the shadow of the canyon like a bum sleeping off a three-day drunk in a ditch. It had no gas stations, no big-name fast-food joints the way Palmetto did. There was a taco stand (Paco’s Tacos) at the edge of the highway just at the turn off to the Naranja Canyon Mobile Home Park. There was a saloon, Coyote Cantina, with an enormous parking lot never quite full up even on a Saturday night. On the front of the cantina was a picture of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner, with the words “Beep! Beep!” in dark letters above the bird’s head. A large movie-style marquee proclaimed: “BINGO—THURS THRU SAT IN CACTUS LOUNGE/LADIES NITE WED/LIVE ENTMENT FRISATSUN/DARK MON.”
Other than these two commercial ventures, Nitro was a graveyard of trailer parks: six of them in a five-mile stretch, Naranja Canyon Mobile Home Park, Sun Dial Trailer Park, Joshua Tree Gardens, Ed and Inez “Home on the Range” Park, Quail Motor Homes, and the more simply named “Park.”
Right now, at ten minutes after midnight, most of the elderly residents of Nitro were asleep. Others sat up in their beds watching television, some played cards with their buddies on card tables erected beneath green-striped plastic awnings in front of their mobile homes, lamps plugged into outdoor sockets. But some of the men and a few of the women were down at the Wash, placing bets on one of Nitro’s most popular summertime sports: the dog fights.
Fights in the Wash usually didn’t get going until twenty minutes after the hour, and on this particular Saturday night, it would be twelve thirty before they began, because one dog had yet to show up.
2
Outside Kevin Sloan’s trailer at the Sun Dial Trailer Park, a truck and two Jeeps pulled up, headlights hitting the dark pit bull that was sitting in front. The dog scampered beneath its home.
A man leaped from the back of the pickup truck. He was drunk. He wore what appeared to be the uniform of the evening: a red baseball cap, tee shirt, jeans, and beer gut. He yelled, “Get your ass out here, Sloan, we gonna howl tonight!”
“Hell, man, they’re fucking like bunnies in there,” the driver of the Jeep said. He’d slid out from behind the wheel and was now standing on his tiptoes, peering through the back window of the trailer. “Let’s just take Lammie and leave
him to his fun. No man wants to get caught with his dick hangin’ out.”
The first man crouched down on his hands and knees and looked beneath the trailer. His gaze was met by two flaring red eyes staring back at him.
The dog growled at him from her shadowy hiding place. She’d dug a shallow ditch there beneath the trailer and was curled up in it.
The man stuck his hand near her muzzle.
She snapped her jaws, and he jerked his hand back just in time to avoid getting his fingers chomped off.
“She tried to kill me,” he said, clutching his hand against his chest like it was a wounded bird.
The other man came around and swatted at his cowering buddy. “Get out of there, Junior, let me show you what a real man can do here.”
“You’re full of it, Fisher.”
The man from the Jeep went down on his knees. The dog’s red eyes flashed out at him. The growl. “You got to know Lammie, now, you got to appeal to the woman in her. Come on, sweet cakes, we gonna take you for little ride in my car.”
This was Nitro at night in the summer.
3
“Hey, Alison!” Charlie Urquart shouted.
He was in the backseat of his father’s Mustang convertible, drunk off his ass. Fuck Dad for telling me I can’t go out tonight, fuck him—the old fart can go to hell for all I care. The voice inside Charlie’s head that spoke those words didn’t seem to be Charlie’s at all, at least not to him, it was something that just got loose inside him sometimes, a kind of wildness that turned off the regular Charlie most of the other kids knew. It was like automatic pilot, and it usually came on after his father gave him a talking-to. That’s one, Charlie thought, knocking back the last of his Budweiser. He waved the can around, crushing it in a fist. He was wearing his letterman’s jacket, and was drenched with either sweat or beer or both—a senior from Yucca Valley, Billy Simpson was driving the car (he was only half-drunk), while Terry Boyd, who had once streaked across the gym floor during one of the girls’ basketball tournaments, rode shotgun and splashed beer indiscriminately around the upholstery.